2. Daniel
two
Daniel
I trim the base off a hedgehog mushroom and drop it in the basket, and my hands are doing the work without me, which is how I know I'm listening for a car.
It's ten to seven. The frost is still on the shaded half of the pullout and gone off the half the sun's found, a hard line straight across the gravel. I've been standing at my tailgate for twenty minutes with a thermos I haven't opened, cleaning yesterday's take that didn't need cleaning again.
I don't do this.
Foraging is solitary work. Two people in one patch is one person too many, and I like the quiet better than I like conversation. I've never run a crew out here. Never wanted one. Twenty years in this forest and the only voice in it has been mine.
Then last night I lay awake thinking about a woman in borrowed boots walking a north slope alone with no map worth the paper and a basket full of false chanterelles, and leaving her to it felt worse than breaking a rule I made up myself.
A small grey car comes up the switchback too slow, the way people drive when they're counting corners.
This time, she gets out in proper boots.
"Silver Ridge has exactly one place that sells these," she says, coming around the hood. "The man asked what I needed them for and then he asked if I knew Daniel, and I said sort of, and he said, and I'm quoting, 'well, you'll want the felt liners then.'"
"You'll want the felt liners,” I agree.
She's got her hair off her neck, a wool layer under a shell that still has the fold creases in it, and a paring knife in a leather sheath she's made herself out of what looks like an old belt. She sees me notice.
"Ten minutes with a punch and some waxed thread," she says. "I wasn't carrying a chef's knife up a mountain"
"That's a good knife."
I hand her a basket — the spare, flat-bottomed, mesh through the base so the spores drop back where they came from. She takes it like she's been handed a station.
We work the bench above Blackwater Creek and I try, for about the first six minutes, to talk less.
It doesn't hold.
"Aspect," I hear myself saying. "This slope faces north-east, so it stays cold and it stays wet, and the sun never sits on it long enough to dry the duff. That's what they want. Anything that catches the full afternoon, don't bother."
"So I'm not looking for mushrooms."
"You're looking for the conditions. The mushroom's the last thing that happens."
She stops. Turns that over. "That's mise en place."
"What?"
"Everything set up before service. If you've done it right the cooking is the smallest part of the night." She scans the ground and I can see her doing it differently already — not hunting orange, reading the whole surface. "The dish is the last thing that happens. You're describing prep."
"Then you'll be fine at this."
She is more than fine. That's the problem.
"What do you do the rest of the year?" she asks, an hour in, working a line of moss with her eyes down.
"Roofs. Estimating, mostly, some install. Eleven years with the same outfit." I move her three paces left with a hand near her elbow, but not touching. "Back on the ladder November third."
"That's a hard swap."
"It's the same job." She looks up at that. "You read a surface and you work out what's under it and you're wrong about a third of the time and it costs you. Roof, slope, doesn't matter. You're either paying attention or you're not."
She goes back to the moss without answering and thirty seconds later I hear her saying something under her breath, and it takes me a while to work out she's running hemlock, fir, hemlock to herself, testing it.
By nine she's found two on her own without me pointing, and the second one she calls before I do — a shoulder of gold under a fir, barely broken through, and she goes down on one knee and cuts it low and brushes it before it goes in the basket.
Lena goes down on her heels to cut and there's a strip of bare skin at the back of her neck under the pinned-up hair, pink from the cold, and I look at it for slightly longer than a man should look at anything he's not picking.
She's fast because she's been trained to be looked at while she works.
I know that kind of speed. My crew has the same vibe.
Men who learned their trade on a roof in the rain with a foreman watching, and it makes them quick and it makes them accurate and it makes them tired in a way that doesn't come off with a shower.
Out here it comes off her by increments.
I watch it happen. Around eleven she stops narrating her own competence and goes quiet, and stays quiet, and I stop hearing her behind me for whole minutes at a time, and when I look back she's sitting on her heels with both hands in the moss looking at nothing.
"You alright?"
"I'm going to tell you something embarrassing," she says.
"I've been off work for four weeks and I've spent every day of it looking for the thing that's supposed to fix me.
Sleep. Vitamin D. A podcast about boundaries.
" She lifts a handful of moss and lets it fall. "It's mud. It was mud the whole time."
"How much leave have you got?"
"Six weeks unpaid. Started the eighth of September." She says it flat. "I'm back on the line the twentieth."
Fifteen days.
Twenty years I've had this forest to myself and never once minded it. Half a day in, and I'm narrating to her like she's already someone I talk to on purpose.
At noon we sit on the tailgate and eat sandwiches she brought from the lodge, which is her second-best move of the day, and she cleans my chanterelles for me without asking, faster than I do it, turning each one and taking the grit out of the ridges with the corner of a folded cloth.
I watch her hands longer than the job requires.
They're wrecked — nicked across two knuckles, a shine of old burn scar down the inside of one wrist, nails cut back to nothing. No hesitation anywhere in them. They’re beautiful.
She holds a chanterelle up by the stem and turns it into the light and her thumb runs the length of one ridge to check it's clean, once, slow, and I have to put my sandwich down and look at the treeline until that's over.
"You'll do that wrong eventually and I'll take them back," I tell her.
"You'll never take them back." She holds one up to the light. "This one's got a beetle."
"That one's fine."
"This one's got a beetle, Daniel."
I take it from her and look and there is, in fact, a beetle stuck on it.
She's grinning at me and there's dirt on her cheekbone and her hands are wrecked and pink from the cold, and something goes over in me, slow, the way a load shifts before you've decided to move it.
"There's weather coming next week," I say. "Rain from the northwest, four or five degrees. That's the kind that gets into you."
"Are you warning me off?"
"I'm telling you to keep an extra pair of dry socks in a bag from now on."
She packs the last of the cleaned gold into my basket and sets the cloth on top of it, squared at the corners.
"From now on?" she repeats.
I hear it after I've said it. I don't take it back. "We can forage again tomorrow," I say. "Seven."